At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium. We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the oncoming denouement which, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of entrance into the house, which had become a sort of adytum, which we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants, that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley, from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed have instituted—as at times I suggested—a sort of analysis of the psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or emotional response, if such observations were possible—that is if we could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in those three elements of our existence at all.
Nothing of a systematic record was kept, but certain very sharp and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied with what might be less flatteringly called frights, and the hazy ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe these—not too tediously—before I rehearse the last convincing stages of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final descent of the "Other World" for the shame of human strife, and the obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the satanic energies of HELL to the confusion of Faith and Hope and Charity.
An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality of heat or coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now on that day was fought the battle of the —— which killed 5000 men here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope, or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke from my sleep wearied and apathetic.
The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and realized the most curious tingling inside my head, as if a thousand or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony, not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief. Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull, while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as the day broke. The aural effects upon me were dual in character. They were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it, an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself of this abominable disagreeableness.
Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place in that month, a few days after the engagements—the suggestion might be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble themselves and repair to any agreed upon rendez-vous—when entering the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered "Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along the floor.
I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have reiterated was familiar with the spiritual world, and her powers of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant bodily sensations had been felt. The voices alone had become to her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible articulations had not been heard—hearing meaning a kind of inaudible utterance within the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices, though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until the last materialization, did I discern faces. I except the special incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible drama.
My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison, should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means and results, the very uttermost image of the End of All Things. The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments, their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy, any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed the extinction of civilized man in Europe.
Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided. Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his allies with pompous declarations, no one seriously thought of him. The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.
See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH, as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards and towns, its bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates, would soon become an empty cenotaph.
Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle. God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vast denouement. The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders, despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges and gas engines and back again of these the grouped multitudes of spectators—all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line of the enemy—vis-a-vis—was thus concentrated, by a common impulse in both camps, for the irrevocable decision, because GOD willed it.